DESTINY GAMES - Chapter 18: An Independent Man.

I am currently re-writing the first chapters of this story. They are quite rough and bounce around a lot and I can do better. At some point, I will replace these with the better chapters.Sometime in 2024 Aethon Books will publish the first volume of this story on Amazon, KU, and audible. This will mean the story will be stubbed. I will notify people far in advance of that.In the dystopian world of the future, life is rough when you live at the bottom. Jobs are non-existent. Far too many people live in poverty, crammed into huge buildings called Habitats. With no jobs in the real world, many people can only find work online in VR worlds as servants to the very rich. And it's getting worse. The old internet is unusable and hacked to pieces. The new system needs AI to run things, but all but one of them were destroyed. The last sentient AI is ordered to create a new game world so the rich can have a playground, and the corporations that rule the world can have a new global market place. Everyone wants a piece of the new game. The guilds are competing to be the first to find the dungeons and kill the biggest monster. The corporations are claiming land and putting in their online market places. Ozzy and his friends just want a paycheck.Four friends sign five year contracts as virtual serfs in a small village, and can't go adventuring at all to gain money. They don't have many choices. They can work as a blacksmith, barmaid and shepherd for all those years....or they can cheat and find ways to take advantage of the system and carve out a section of the game world for themselves, and earn a fortune in the real world.When they give you a mop and not a sword, you have to find the loopholes and change the rules.

Spicy Fabre, a YouTuber specializing in poisonous insects and venomous creatures is reincarnated in a Murim. The Tang Family of Sacheon wants him.

Jacob Steve, an Old Man, died at 116 after living a whole life.

But Jacob always had a dark side, which he always suppressed and hid from others.
However, in the later years of his life, when death was inevitable, he understood there wasn't any point in having wealth, knowledge, or desires if you couldn't have a life to enjoy them.

He became obsessed with fabled immortality and devoted his reaming life to extending his fleeting lifespan, but just like any other failed.

However, he mysteriously got another chance at life and found a way that led to fabled immortality.
But he was also forewarned that the way led to it was filled with blood and darkness!

In the end, Jacob chose it anyway with no way of going back, and it was also the start of his suffering and his icky, brutal journey toward the 'Immortality' he wanted so badly!

Gu Man, who transmigrated from ancient times, woke up in the body of the Gu family’s second daughter.

As soon as she woke up, she saw the fiance of the original body who had hooked up with her stepsister. Faced with the scumbag’s confident questioning, disgusted gaze and a slap to her face, Gu Man’s reaction was to return a fierce blow to him. She hit him until he was dizzy and knelt to the ground, his lower body covered in cold sweat. Gu Man only realized that a video of her walking into the room had been leaked after she left, and the matter had begun to spread rapidly.

Countless people insulted Gu Man and called her a mistress.

Faced with a two-faced stepsister, a malicious and deceiving stepmother who climbed her way up from being a mistress, and a father who couldn’t tell wrong from right and treated her as more of an adopted daughter, as well as those stupid onlookers who didn’t know the truth of the matter and called her a country girl… Gu Man ignored them all.

The top scorer in the college entrance examination, top hacker, divine doctor, financial tycoon…

All kinds of identities were attached to a single person. Gu Man relied on her own strength to ruthlessly slap them all back in the face!

The noble Xiang family’s eldest son, a powerful man in the capital, even declared to the public that his wife was mischievous, and that he would take the blame if she made a mistake.

Just when everyone was wondering who this sweet wife of his was, the entertainment headlines published a photo of him holding his sweet wife as they walked in and out of a high-end hotel. The woman in the picture was Gu Man!

Xiang family’s son: Everyone, meet my wife!